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Divided We Fall tries to answer the unanswerable
by Joe Tarr
Although it is considered by many to be the great Holocaust movie, I always thought Schindler's List was overrated. It drove home the gruesome horrors of what happened in concentration camps, but to me it lacked real people, and never resonated. The hero Schindler is too enigmatic for viewers to relate to and we never get a clear understanding of why he went against his opportunistic nature to save hundreds of Jews. Concentration-camp head Amon Goeth, eerily portrayed by Ralph Fiennes, may have been more realistic, but he was a monster no sane person could relate to and certainly wasn't your average German or Nazi sympathizer. And although the movie is populated with lots of Jews, they all remain faceless, almost props for Schindler's heroism. We don't get to see the world through their eyes.
The Czech film Divided We Fall (or,in its native language, MusÍme si pomáhat) is in many ways a polar opposite of Schindler's List. In this movie, we never see any of the actual brutalities of the Holocaust, or even a concentration camp. The story isn't meant to be an epic, but instead concentrates on a small Czech neighborhood and how they coped with despotic foreign occupation. We get lots of believable characters, complex in all their failings and strengths. And we come to some understanding of why they make the choices they do.
Written and directed by Jan Hrebejk, the movie is masterfully set up. In the opening minutes of the film, the Germans invade a Czech town. The wealthy Jewish Wiener family is first forced from their house into a small apartment and then deported to a concentration camp. Most of the family's neighbors feel sad for them but are resigned as they go about their own lives. But after a few months in the camps, the family's son, David, escapes and returns to his hometown, looking for someone to help him.
One of his family's former employees, Josef Cizek (Bolek PolÍvka) and his wife Marie (Anna Sisková) stumble across him, and reluctantly agree to hide him in their food closet.
Already taking a huge risk, the couple is burdened by an obnoxious associate and former employee of the Wiener family's factory, Horst Prohaska (Jaroslav Dusek) who has a crush on Marie and keeps visiting unannounced. Horst (with his Hitler-style mustache) is a Nazi collaborator with no sympathy for the Jews or even the Wieners, who had treated him well.
To avoid suspicion and limit Horst's visits, Josef takes a job working alongside him for the Nazis, sorting through the belongings of Jews. The effort earns him the contempt of his neighbors, even the ones who don't have the courage he does.
But Divided is not a cut-and-dried morality tale. The heroes aren't really all that heroic—Josef is lazy and he soils himself during an early close call with Nazi soldiers. And after a while, it becomes clear that he's acting in his own interest as much as Wiener's or humanity's.
Likewise, the villains aren't simply evil. Although he's a spineless bore, Horst shows himself to be much more troubled and conflicted than he appears at first glance. His evil is founded on self-preservation, as much as Josef's good will is.
Meanwhile, the refugee Wiener is racked by the guilt of being a survivor as well as burdening and risking the lives of his protectors. Unfortunately, his character remains too much in the closet and could have been fleshed out a bit.
Everyone who has ever considered the Holocaust seriously has probably wondered how they would have reacted in a similar situation. In that sense, this movie isn't about the Holocaust so much as a study in the way people respond to such tyranny. Divided We Fall makes clear that few people are either extremely heroic or completely evil, even if their actions support something as horrific as the Holocaust.
Unfortunately, as the movie winds down it becomes overly sentimental and tries to uplift. This feels good, after so many tense moments, but it is dishonest. The liberating Red Army may have put an end to Nazi rule, but it replaced it with an almost equally oppressive one.
This everything-will-be-OK-and-people-are-ultimately-good tone also crippled Schindler's List at the end.
Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, wrote about other Holocaust movies: "The individual acts of courage found in the testimony of Holocaust survivors can never compensate for the knowledge gleaned of human depravity. There is no light at the end of that tunnel or even an end. It leads to a place with neither redemption nor closure."
We only get that in the movies.
August 23, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 34
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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